Years of skiing prompts sharing of countless memories during the holiday season

The holidays are noted for the exchange of gifts, but they are also an ideal time for trading memories.

Connie and I thought it would be fun to ask Bob Dever and Paul Hand to have lunch with us and replay the good times we had on the slopes of several continents.

Originally they were business connections: both had been general managers of the state’s leading dairy farmers cooperative and I was manager of sales and marketing for a company peddling their milk to consumers. We had a common interest in commerce. We really hit it off, however, when we discovered that all of us were passionate about skiing.

Since I was picking up the lunch tab, I could be quarterback and call audibles at the line of scrimmage whenever the subject referred to the milk business. Ski recollections only, please, was the edict. Paul did wedge in a recollection of a free milk promotion we sponsored at Roundtop.

Between courses we tried to remember ski areas we had visited together. In our long association we skied at Roundtop and Liberty, many of the Poconos areas and major resorts of New England and eastern Canada. We had many good times in the American west, Alberta and British Columbia.

Most dramatic may have been our frequent trips to the Alps of Austria, France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland. After business hours I was editor and publisher of “The Blue Book of European Ski Resorts,” and I asked them to write stories for us.

Their contributions earned them membership in the Eastern Ski Writers Association (ESWA and its parent organization North American Snowsports Journalists Association (NASJA).

There is not enough space here for a complete rundown of trails we carved again in our three hour lunch. Here is a truncated list:

—Annual trips to Utah and opportunities to ski with Norse god Stein Eriksen and Ski Utah President Nathan Rafferty, and have breakfast with the Olympic Mahre twins and moonwalker astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

—Annual meetings of disabled skiers in Breckenridge, where delightful Diana Golden, amputee winner of an Olympic demonstration gold in Calgary (1988), was way ahead on a run and could even beat us in poling across a flat area.

—A slalom race at Telluride against another Olympian, Austria’s Franz Klammer (downhill gold in Innsbruck,’76). On a 12-gate course he gave us a four-gate start — and beat us by four.

— Kibitzing training sessions of the U.S. and Swiss women’s teams in huge arenas of Las Lenas on the Argentina side of the Andes.

— Among the four of us, we have skied in most Olympic venues, here and abroad, including those in Chamonix, St. Moritz, Lake Placid, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Cortina, Squaw Valley, Innsbruck, Grenoble, Calgary, Albertville, Lillehammer, Salt Lake City, Turin and Vancouver. The only ones we never visited were Sarajevo in Jugoslavia and Saporo and Nagano in Japan. We have no plans for Souchi, Russia in 2014.

When we played Can You Top This, Paul Hand had a vivid memory of our skiing past the Matterhorn from Zermatt in Switzerland down into Cervinia in Italy, yodeling much of the way. I voted for my flying up to the glacier on Mt. Cook in New Zealand for an eight-mile run. Bob Dever could have won our name-dropping contest with his tale of gliding in a parachute down into Verbier.

But he certainly topped us all with his experience in Dubai on the Persian Gulf. He skied indoors on a 200-meter slope, with the temperature at 28 degrees inside the dome and 120 outside in the desert air.

Our luncheon conversation did get around to some bumps in the trails. We were able to laugh at them now, but they were not funny then:

—Paul remembered breaking his thumb when dismounting the chairlift in Okemo.

—Bob was blindsided on Copper Mountain and spent the afternoon in the aid station shaking off the concussion.

— Connie’s skiing in Breckenridge, a resort with a base elevation of 9,600 feet, was aborted by acute mountain sickness. She spent several hours sniffing oxygen in a hospital — and several days as a spectator dragging a portable tank.

We did have another regret at our holiday lunch .We missed Susan and Thelma and Bill, who had joined us on many adventures. We could have invited many other skiers with whom we have cavorted on the snow.

Many of them are members of the ski writer associations (who bow to Bob Dever, now a member of the board of ESWA). But out there in the white world are hundreds of others with whom we shared this rewarding sport.

They are the strangers who this week would smile and greet us with “Joyeux No+’el, Buon Natal, or Frohe Weihnachten.”

Ted Heck is editor of “The Blue Book of European Ski Resorts” (BlueBookSki.com). He also writes for GolfSki andTravel.com.

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